Modelizing epistemologies
Organizing Catholic sanctity from calendar-based martyrologies to today’s mobile apps
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 10739229 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Jenny Ponzo (0000-0003-4952-8933, Università degli Studi di Torino , Turin , Italy, corresponding author), Gabriele Marino (0000-0003-3358-9563, Università degli Studi di Torino , Turin , Italy) |
| Year | 2021 |
| Volume | 2021 |
| Issue | 239 |
| Pages | 201-223 |
| Publication date | 2021-03-26 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Semiotica (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0037-1998 • E-ISSN: 1613-3692 |
| Publisher | Walter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE) |
| DOI | 10.1515/sem-2019-0089 |
| OpenAlex | W3131315691 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 9 |
The Catholic concept of “sanctity” can be thought of as a “cultural unit” (Eco) composed of a wide variety of “grounds” (Peirce) or distinctive features. The figures of individual saints, i.e., tokens of sanctity, are characterized by a particular set of grounds, organized and represented in texts of different genres. This paper presents a semiotic study of texts seeking to offer an encompassing view of “sanctity” by listing all the saints and supplementing their names with a short description of their lives emphasizing the grounds characterizing each of them. The analysis focuses on a seminal liturgical text, the Martyrologium Romanun (1584–2004), and the first official encyclopedia of saints, the Bibliotheca Sanctorum (1961–2013), as well as a sample of digital texts and media such as websites and mobile apps. While the first text offers a dogmatic perspective on sanctity and saintly figures and the second offers a historical and culturological one, websites succeed in reconciling the two paradigms into a single syncretic form of interactive fruition in which the more up-to-date encyclopedic model subsumes the traditional calendar one and, in the case of apps, adds a glocal dimension, enhancing situated cognition. The analysis shows that the introduction of the encyclopedic genre and subsequent proliferation of digital repertoires is connected to a shift in the Catholic “episteme” (Foucault) of sanctity and a growing tendency to consider saints as not (only) religious characters and objects of cult, but (also) as historical individuals and components of a culture and, consequently, as suitable objects of critical discourse
Aesthetics · Art · Cult · Dimension (graph theory) · Epistemology · Literature · Perspective (graphical) · Semiotics · Situated · Sociology · Theology · Visual arts · Computer Science · Media, Religion, Digital Communication · Medieval Literature and History · Philosophy · Visual Culture and Art Theory
| Citations per year | 0.5 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2020 - 2023 (4) |
| Highly cited | No |